The West’s long run as top dog may be ending. But the values that made it great, consumerism included, have been sold on to the rest of the world

Civilization: The West and the Rest. By Niall Ferguson. Allen Lane; 402 pages; £25. To be published in America by Penguin Press in November; $35. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

THE two great issues of the age, Niall Ferguson believes, are how a handful of Western countries came to dominate the world, and whether their domination is now threatened by the rise of Asia. Not one to shrink from epic questions, Mr Ferguson, a British historian, has written a dazzling history of Western ideas that sets out to provide the reader with epic answers. Broadly speaking, he is more successful in explaining the West's triumph than in forecasting its fate.

Mr Ferguson starts with the overwhelming success of European civilisation. In 1500 Europe's future imperial powers controlled 10% of the world's territories and generated just over 40% of its wealth. By 1913, at the height of empire, the West controlled almost 60% of the territories, which together generated almost 80% of the wealth. This stunning fact is lost, he regrets, on a generation that has supplanted history's sweep with a feeble-minded relativism that holds “all civilisations as somehow equal”.

After that swipe, the book goes on to devote a chapter to each of the six ingredients that Mr Ferguson thinks together explain Western success (try not to be put off when he calls them the West's “killer apps”). Science, medicine and the protestant work ethic are familiar characters in this drama. More unusual are the grubby commercial trio that Marxist historians often underestimate: competition, property rights and the consumer society.

The pace is brisk thanks to Mr Ferguson's technique of weaving contrasts between the West and the rest. These include the riotous and merciless competition for spices between European merchant-explorers, next to the static perfection and, ultimately, the stagnation of the Forbidden City in imperial China; the more-or-less free inquiry of Thomas Hooke and Isaac Newton in 17th-century England (see article) versus the demolition of Takiyuddin's “blasphemous” observatory in 16th-century Istanbul; the respect for private property among the pioneering middle-class of north America, contrasted with the misery of an underclass south of the equator that had little hope of wealth except by rising up against its abusive landlords.

Mr Ferguson is almost gleeful when he argues that the consumer society, butt of the bien pensant left, was the cog in the industrial machine that communism overlooked. “Capitalists”, he writes, “understood what Marx missed: that workers were also consumers. It therefore made no sense to try to grind their wages down to subsistence levels.” By contrast, although Soviet Russia could produce fighter jets and H-bombs, its jeans were rubbish.

Historians will find things to pick at—how could they not in a whistle-stop journey through 600 years? The politically correct will bristle at Mr Ferguson's defence of empire—though he does not shy from its enormities. But the book's main weakness lies when it comes to the second question: is the West doomed?

Mr Ferguson presents a thesis that the West risks not the genteel decline of old age so much as collapse. As a highly complex system, civilisation has a “tendency to move quite suddenly from stability to instability.” That, he argues, was what happened to Ancient Rome, the Ming dynasty in 17th-century China, the Bourbons in 18th-century France, 20th-century Britain and, most recently, the Soviet Union. The West's present fiscal crisis might yet prove to be a symptom of the rot within.

Leave aside whether the rule of Caesars was really shattered in a generation or whether the French revolution marked the end of a civilisation. The trouble with Mr Ferguson's view that the West may collapse is that he also believes Asia is adopting the West's values. China, following the path of Japan, is harnessing Western science, medicine and technology, and encouraging its hard-working people to become consumers and, within limits, to own their own homes. That is not so much a defeat of the West as its triumph.

Unless Asia has any exclusive “killer apps” of its own, it is hard to see how such a triumph could alone condemn the West to disaster. Whereas a handful of Western countries were once at it, a whole planet has started to join in. More likely than the end of civilisation—and more boring—is that the West will just cease to be special.